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Are there any products such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion 2.0 that are free or open source?

I'd like to run Windows from my Mac from (Intel based) Mac OS X but would prefer not to have to buy one of these products.

And if there are no other (or functional) solution, which of these products are superior and why?

Update: Not sure it matters, but I mainly want to run Windows Vista Ultimate.

user9517
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Frank V
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4 Answers4

11

Check out VirtualBox.

It even has seamless mode where you can run your program in a 'native' window on the desktop.

Dave Drager
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  • I had hard time to find what "per-window" virtualization is in Parallels or Fusion, which is not supported on VirtualBox. Would you post a link? Thanks. – Sunny Jun 17 '09 at 19:22
  • Thats funny, because I use it on Linux command line so that I can run Windows GUI remotely! :) – Dave Drager Jun 17 '09 at 19:22
  • Sunny, by per-window I meant seamless. And you are right - you can run seamless with VirtualBox, I forgot about that. Will update my response. – Dave Drager Jun 17 '09 at 19:25
  • I replaced Parallels with VirtualBox and am much happier. The VMs are snappier, not to mention cross platform. We'll see how Oracle handles this incredible product in the future. – Scott Pack Jun 17 '09 at 19:39
  • I use VB on Windows to virtualize Linux servers for testing / playing. – steve.lippert Jun 17 '09 at 19:49
  • I heard VirtualBox was acquired by Oracle, does this change their FOSS status? I currently use VirtualBox but if there are other visualization packages I'd be more inclined to switch to one of them given Oracle's handling (or lack-there-of) of MySQL. – Jeff Welling May 08 '11 at 20:06
4

You could try VirtualBox. It supports MacOS and has good reviews.

chmeee
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3

virtualbox works on OS X (intel). It also supports "seamless" windows, i.e. opening an windows app on your Mac desktop.

Sunny
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0

I would recommend VirtualBox, it has a nice Remote Desktop setting on beta version which can emulate Unity on Vmware Fusion.

hendrasaputra
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